It’s release day for Undercover Heat, the second in my Tough Love series. This series focuses on men and women in “tough” careers who sometimes need a little help finding (and believing in) happily ever after.
In Undercover Heat, two FBI agents are assigned to an undercover assignment, posing as husband and wife. Going in, neither has any expectations aside from solving the case. It doesn’t take long for those expectations to turn carnal, and soon they are fighting an ever-increasing attraction, in order to close their case.
In honor of the release of this steamy read, I got to sit down with a fellow reader and talk about the two main characters in this book, Kyra Sanders and Quinn Daniels. Below is the interview, which gives you a little history on Quinn and Kyra’s personalities.
Reader: Thank you, Tami, for visiting. And congratulations on the new release!
Me: Thank you! I’m super excited. I fell in love with Quinn and Kyra as I wrote their story, and I think I fell even more in love after my editor got ahold of them. There are two very powerful personalities in this book, which makes for good writing and (hopefully) even better reading.
Reader: Two powerful personalities, I like that. Okay, tell us about Quinn first.
Me: Besides the fact he’s super sexy (duh!), he’s a little bit of an anti-hero. Quinn’s parents had him young – straight out of high school, actually. When his mother realized she was pregnant, his father did the right thing and married her. Except it wasn’t really the right thing. Lawrence Daniels, you’ll learn in the book, is not exactly the best husband or father figure. In fact, he’s a career criminal who likes to beat up on his wife and verbally abuse his son every chance he gets.
Growing up in that environment, Quinn could have gone either way – follow in dear ole’ dad’s footsteps or rebel against everything he ever stood for. Lucky for us, he opted for choice number two. He worked his ass off and was accepted into the FBI. He’s one of their strongest agents, mostly because he views the world in black and white, or good and bad. There is no gray area for Quinn Daniels. If you break the law, you should be punished, period.
He has a lot of internal angst, though, as a result of his upbringing. He doesn’t have many friends, he avoids relationships at almost all costs, and when he isn’t on the job, he tends to hit the bottle pretty hard, so as to avoid dealing with his demons. Oh, and he volunteers weekly at a church located in his old neighborhood, because the priest there helped him out a lot when he was a kid. But he doesn’t tell anyone he does it, and he gets pretty ticked off when Kyra finds out.
Reader: Doesn’t sound like he’s exactly primed to find love.
Me (laughs): Not really. But it usually happens when you’re least expecting it, right?
Reader: True, true. All right, tell us about Kyra. What makes her special enough to butt heads with Quinn?
Me: Kyra comes from an unpolluted background. Her parents have been married – happily – for thirty-five years. They both have successful careers outside the home, and they have always encouraged Kyra to follow her dreams. A fascination with Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys (yeah, I know they were before her time, but they’re classics!) led to a love of Julie Garwood’s Buchanan-Renard series, which ultimately led Kyra down the path to FBI field agent.
Kyra was lucky enough to be assigned to the regional office in her hometown, Dallas. She threw herself into her work with gusto, and was eventually assigned to a huge Ponzi scheme case that could have been the pinnacle of her career. Meanwhile, she had struck up a relationship with a fellow agent, even though her director frowned upon interoffice affairs. But Kyra thought the relationship was serious, that they would eventually get married and have babies and live happily ever after – like her parents. Except Keith, her boyfriend at the time, cheated on her. To make it worse, he cheated with the perp Kyra was trying to nab. And his cheating ultimately allowed the perp to get away.
Eventually, Kyra gets reassigned to the Detroit office – where Quinn works – because she refuses to give up closing that particular case. In fact, it’s that case that leads she and Quinn to end up working undercover as husband and wife. Except by this point, Kyra has lost all faith in happily ever after, and Quinn, of course, never believed in it at all. So you can imagine the resistance when they start feeling an attraction to one another.
Reader: These two sound like an unlikely couple. And yet, hope springs eternal, right?
Me: My goal in all of my books is to figure out a way for the hero and heroine to find their happily ever after. With everything I put them through, they deserve it.
Reader: One more question, before I let you go to celebrate your release day. What’s your favorite scene in the book?
Me (gnawing on lower lip): What an impossibly hard question. My mind instantly hops to the final scene in the book, but that’s because I’m a sucker for happily ever after, and I adore Quinn and Kyra’s HEA. But I’d rather readers read the book before we discuss the ending. So let’s see…. This is really hard. Okay, the one I keep coming back to is when Quinn finds out Kyra has been hiding something about the case, and he confronts her, and she gets angry – at herself and him. She storms out of the room and heads down to the basement, where they’ve set up a home gym of sorts. The scene that follows was so fun to write… and so steamy to read. Just thinking about it now makes me want to fan myself. When Kyra and Quinn finally succumb, they certainly do it in style.
Reader: Wow. I know I’m curious! If you are too, I’d better give you a few buy links:
Crimson Romance: http://www.crimsonromance.com/contemporary-romance-novels/undercover-heat/
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Heat-Tough-Love-Tami-ebook/dp/B00R6TPT90
Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/undercover-heat-tami-lund/1120945425?ean=9781440588914
Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/undercover-heat-1
ARe: https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-undercoverheat-1711668-152.html
Oh yeah, and there’s a Rafflecopter giveaway! Three prizes:
* The entire collection of The Resort series (5 e-books)
* $20 gift card to Amazon
* Candy Crush e-book
Enter here:
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/c48fa52711/?
Thank you, dear readers, for stopping by today. If you have any questions, ask in the comments below, and I’ll give you an answer as quickly as I can. And don’t forget to charge that e-reader, so you can start Undercover Heat — today!
###
Leave a Reply